1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to a preparation element set, a preparation, a manufacturing method of preparation, an imaging apparatus, and an imaging method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In pathological diagnosis, a tissue is cut out from an organ or a tumor of a body of a patient and is examined to confirm diagnosis of a disease and to determine the extent of the disease. In this process, the cut tissue is sectioned into a slice having a thickness of several microns and sandwiched between glass plates as a pathological slide (specimen) to be examined under a microscope. Since pathological diagnosis is an examination that is typically performed to determine whether a tumor is benign or malignant, several hundred specimens could be produced a day in each hospital. Unlike radiograph, pathological specimens are difficult to store in the form of data. For this reason, the produced specimens themselves are typically stored in a semi-permanent fashion for later reference.
Microscopes have been used to observe a microstructure of a living tissue. The microscope enlarges light transmitted through an observation target or light reflected from the observation target through a lens. An observer directly views an enlarged image of light. A digital microscope photographs a microscope image through a camera, and indicates the image on a display to be observed. Multiple persons are thus enabled to view the image concurrently or a from a remote place. The camera is located at an imaging plane and photographs an image that is enlarged through the lens of the microscope.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 4-316478 discloses a technique that allows a user to view a microstructure of a tissue through a contact image sensing (CIS) system. In the CIS system, an observation target is directly placed on the surface of an image sensor and then photographed. The CIS system is free from using an image enlarged through the lens, and a magnification ratio is thus determined by the pixel size of the image sensor. In other words, the smaller the pixel size is, the finer microstructure is photographed.